Saturday, April 15, 2017

During
the Rama Janmabhumi commotion ca. 1990, it was the done thing for secularists
to deny that Muslims had ever committed destruction of Hindu sacred buildings
and statues. This even became the official position worldwide, for practically
all Indologists and India-watchers interiorized it and zealously condemned any
acknowledgment of Islamic iconoclasm as stemming from “Hindu fanaticism”. However,
this position is hard to sustain, because it is so obviously untrue. Therefore,
they have recently refined their propaganda strategy, in two ways.

First,
they now minimize Islamic iconoclasm, but admit some of it. Not that they would
concede the Islamic motivation for this Mandir-and-Murti destruction, but
alright, some Muslims had done it. That, after all, is what human beings do,
Hindus included, see? As long as Islam remains out of the picture, they are
willing to admit a little bit of destruction for the sake of salvaging their
own credibility.

Second,
they now try to make Hinduism guilty of the crimes of Islam, viz. by providing
the inspiration through its own example. Muslims destroyed Hindu temples
because Hindus had destroyed Hindu temples. Provincials like our secularists
and their foreign imitators try to lead you by the nose towards whatever
happened within India’s borders, and never ask, nor want you to ask, what the
record of Islam outside India is, including in the period before it entered
India. They don’t want you to realize that Islam’s behaviour in India was only
a continuation of its behavior in West Asia and around the Mediterranean,
starting with Mohammed’s own model behaviour in Arabia.

The
secularist narrative is now being propagated everywhere and inserted into the
textbooks of history, including in the projected new textbooks mulled over by
the National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). As per the
official procedure, there is a provision for feedback from the public. A friend
of mine sent in an objection to the NCERT’s scenario. What follows is the NCERT’s
response, interspersed with my comments.

Bluff

“The
objection to the cited passage – that temples demonstrated the power and
resources of the kings who built them and that is the reason why medieval
rulers targeted the temples of rival rulers -- can be substantiated by
innumerable references.”

This is sheer bluff. The two examples given
do of course not amount to the "innumerable" cases which they
mendaciously claim to have. Nor have such numbers of cases been mentioned
elsewhere. Yet, given the strong motive the NCERT secularists have to overrule
the straightforward narrative of Islamic iconoclasm, they would by now
certainly have published a book full of such evidence, and made sure it was
quoted in every relevant paper and editorial – if it existed.

Sheer
bluff, we said, but in the real world, there is nothing “sheer” about bluff. On
the contrary, bluff is a mighty weapon that can produce impressive results.
Take the Rama Janmabhumi controversy. The secularists suddenly claimed that all
the Muslims and Hindus and Europeans who had unitedly assumed that a Rama
temple had stood at the disputed site on which the Babri Masjid had been
imposed, had all been wrong. They offered no evidence whatsoever for their
proposed scenario (say, a sales contract in which a landlord sold Babar a piece
of empty real estate to build a mosque on), and denied the evidence on the
opposite side which had existed all along and which accumulated further once
the challenge to bring more evidence had been raised.

Though
their behaviour was that of conspiracy-mongers, their shrill bluff carried
authoritative public opinion with it. They managed to make the Government
abandon its plans for a negotiated settlement, they managed to have national
and state governments toppled, they managed to trigger a number of bloodbaths,
all through “sheer bluff”. Even when they collapsed one after another when
questioned in Court, even when their bluff had been exposed (though the media
did all they could to hide this development from you), they have never
apologized, never publicly admitted how wrong they had been. Bluff can get you
very far in life, so the NCERT tries more of it.

Even the evidential value of their “evidence” is
bluff. No matter how many cases of Hindu idol abduction they manage to find, it
will never amount to proof for the hypothesis they really want to push: that
Muslim conquerors and rulers did what they did because Hindus had inspired them
to do it. These conquerors mostly didn’t even know the record of Hindu kings,
and at any rate they didn’t care. They would never have wanted to be seen
imitating the idolaters and instead invoked the solid justification for
iconoclasm within their own tradition. Mohammed himself had set the example,
and in his wake came the conquerors of West Asia and the Mediterranean,
unaffected by Hindu examples.

Power of
discrimination

“Consider
the gold statue of Vishnu which was once in the Lakshmana temple of Khajuraho.
The statue actually belonged to the rulers of Kangra, it was taken by the
Pratiharas and finally by the Candella ruler Yasovarman just before 950 CE (and
a near contemporary of Mahmud Ghazni). The inscription in the foundation stone
of the Khajuraho Laksmana temple commemorated these events and stated – “With
his troops of elephants and horses, Herambapala (Pratihara, ruler of Kanauj)
seized it form [the king of Kangra]. Obtaining it from his son, the (Pratihara)
prince Devapala, the illustrious (Candella) king Yasovarman – an ornament among
kings and a crusher of enemies – performed the ritual establishment of [Vishnu]
Vaikuntha [in the Laksmana temple at Khajuraho]”. See, F. Kielhorn.
“Inscriptions from Khajuraho”, Epigraphica Indica, vol. 1 (1892), p. 192.”

This example is a beautiful illustration
precisely of how Hindu idol-kidnapping differs radically from Islamic
idol-breaking. According to the NCERT itself, the Vishnu statue from Khajuraho
was abducted not once but twice, and ended up (not walled into a lavatory or
underfoot, nor smashed to pieces, but) consecrated as a prominent Murti in a
Vaishnava temple, exactly where it belonged. What was abducted, was merely an
object of art, duly consecrated. There was no destruction of the religion
behind the Murti. It was used for Vaishnava worship in its original site, after
it was abducted, and again after Yasovarman abducted it. Further, the worship
at the temples robbed of their Murtis, was perfectly allowed to continue,
though they would have to install a new Murti.

By
contrast, in Islamic iconoclasm, the goal was to destroy the “idolatrous”
religion of which the Murtis were an expression. The destruction of Murtis and
the demolition of Mandirs had the purpose of destroying Hinduism or whichever
the Pagan religion behind some given Murtis was. When Mahmud Ghaznavi was done
destroying the Somnath temple, he did not mean to let Shiva worship resume at
the site, not as long as he was militarily in a position to prevent it. While
Yasovarman installed the abducted Vishnu Murti for worship, Mahmud Ghaznavi
would have the captured Murtis destroyed, or worked them into lavatory walls or
into floors in order the humiliate them -- not so much the Murtis themselves
but the religion they represented. In destroying the Somnath Shivalingam, he
meant to destroy Shiva worship.

One
day, a man needed some paper to light a campfire, but he had none. His friend
suggested: I have some paper, wait. And he took his wallet to produce a wad of
dollar bills. The friend turned out not to see any significance in the dollar
bills, only their material dimension. Whether a little rectangle of paper was a
currency note worth an exchange value, or a newspaper clipping containing
specific information, or merely a blank slip of paper, they were all the same
to him: enough paper to light a campfire with. Now that is Nehruvian secularism
for you: a deliberate suspension of the power of discrimination. This wilful
superficiality claims not to see any difference between abducting an object
without any further consequence and destroying this object as part of the
attempted destruction of the religion it stands for.

Lalitaditya

“From
a different cultural zone note also the example of the conflict between the
soldiers of the Gauda (Bengal) ruler and the ruler of Kashmir, Lalitaditya. The
episode concerns the moment when the Bengali rulers chose to attack the idol of
Vishnu Parihasakesava who was providentially saved because the soldiers mistook
this image of the royal God for another. The Rajatarangini notes – “Though the
king was abroad, the priests observed that the soldiers wanted to enter, and
they closed the gates of the Parihasakesava shrine. Aroused with boldness, the
soldiers got hold of the silver Ramasvamin image, which they mistook for
Parihasakesava. They carried it out and ground it into dust. And even as
Lalitaditya’s troops who had come out from the city were killing them at each
step, the Gaudas continued to break it into particles and scatter them in every
direction.” See Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, trans., Rajatarangini, The saga of the
Kings of Kashmir, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1935, pp. 326-28.”

Note firstly that this
Lalitaditya episode is also related, complete with the spin dear to the NCERT,
inRobert M.
Hayden, Aykan Erdemir,Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Devika
Rangachari, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Enrique López-Hurtado, and Milica
Bakić-Hayden: Antagonistic
Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces, 2013, p.136-137. As you can see, the
Nehruvian secularist bluff is being spread far and wide and is acquiring the
status of academic orthodoxy.

We are here dealing with a typical case of
Western imitators, if not careerists who want to serve the current orthodoxy of
battling “Islamophobia”. Concerning India, they have completely swallowed
the Nehruvian bias. Thus, about Islamic iconoclasm deniers Romila Thapar and
Richard Eaton, they say: “As scholars of India in the late 20th
century, their aim in doing so is to counter the accusations by Hindu
nationalists that the Muslims uniquely violated the sensibilities and rights of
Hindus by destroying temples, by showing that Hindu rulers had done much the
same thing before Muslims reached India.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

It is in itself commendable that they point out the
political intentions of these academics. These have a purpose other than
dispassionately seeking the truth, which to Marxists would only be “bourgeois
objectivity”. While not in itself disqualifying their research, it should at
least set some alarm bells ringing. But this political bias only enjoys the unquestioning
approval of the new generation of dupes.

So much have they already interiorized the belief in
Hindu iconoclasm that they take it one step further: “From the perspective of
the AT [= Antagonistic Tolerance]
project, of course it would be surprising if Hindu rulers had not done so.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Naturally they should think so, for it fits in with
the reigning paradigm that “all religions are essentially the same”.

At the end, when practical conclusions are drawn,
fashionable academics tend to differentiate again and favour Islam over
Hinduism, e.g. by clamouring about “Islamophobia” but ignoring “Hinduphobia”
(including their own); but at some point within their narrative, it is useful
to put forward the equality and sameness of all religions, viz. in order to
preclude or drown out all specific Hindu complaints about distinctly Islamic
behaviour.

Since those authors are only second-hand spokesmen
of the Nehruvian view, they sometimes let on facts that, when properly
analysed, don’t really fit their narrative, e.g.: “Tantalizingly, Eaton
(2000a:293) mentions that temples not identified with royal patrons were
generally left unharmed.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Tantalizing? Only if you pursue the Nehruvian
paradigm. In fact it follows logically from the difference between Hinduism and
Islam. If at all there were Hindu kings who “harmed” temples because through
them they wanted to harm hostile kings, they clearly opted for a policy that
constituted another distinction with Muslim iconoclasm: they left politically
irrelevant temples untouched. By contrast, when Muslim armies went on an
iconoclastic spree, they did not care about these petty considerations,
precisely because their motive had nothing to do with “royal patrons” but only with
non-Islamic religion.

Thus, when the Ghurid army ca. 1193 destroyed a
“thousand” temples in Varanasi (as admitted by Eaton), obviously not all of
them had enjoyed royal patronage. But all of them contained Pagan idols, and
what was enough to get the Muslim conquerors in a destructive mood. This off-hand
refutes the whole point of this new-fangled soft-Marxist hypothesis: that
iconoclasm had nothing to do with religion.

Now,
as to Lalitaditya, he
defeated the Gauda king, invited him with the Parihasakeshava (Vaishnava) idol as guarantee for
the Gauda king’s safety, yet had him murdered. To take revenge, the Gauda
servants contrived to visit the relevant shrine in order to destroy this idol.
Though they mistook another idol for Parihasakeshava (and apparently the story
is gleefully told in order to convey this idol’s supposed cleverness in
arranging for its own safety at the expense of another), they did indeed
destroy the idol that they could lay their hands on. The fragmentation of the
idol is duly described.

So, this indeed is one rare case where Hindus
destroyed a Hindu idol. To be sure, they did nothing to Vaishnavism in Kashmir,
nor in Bengal, nor anywhere else. They only wanted to get at that particular
idol, a radical difference with the numerous campaigns of idol-breaking by
Muslims, who were not so fussy. While Hindus did it, Hinduism was not involved.
On the contrary, the text itself stipulates that their motive was quite
mundane, viz. vengeance for their murdered king. The perpetrators did not quote
any Hindu scripture prescribing: “Thou shalt destroy a Parihasakeshava idol
whenever thou seest one!” They did not invoke any idol-breaking model behaviour
of a Vedic Rishi.

Islamic iconoclasm

We have spent some time writing out several pages in
analyzing the NCERT response to an objection. To be sure, a fool can famously
ask more questions in a few lines than a normal man can answer in a number of
pages. Nevertheless, the fact deserves mention that, through misdirection, the
NCERT has succeeded in keeping us busy all while the true answer was so simple.
We have been forced to deal with two of the handful of cases of idol-abduction
and iconoclasm by Hindus as the supposed reason for Islamic iconoclasm, when in
reality, Islamic iconoclasm had nothing to do anything good or bad done by a
Hindu. And no secret is made of this in Muslim chronicles, clear enough about
the real motive.

Neither the NCERT, nor the Nehruvian historians, nor
their foreign followers, has ever succeeded in finding a Muslim chronicle saying
that “the Sultan was inspired by Hindu example to destroy idols and demolish
temples”. The point, after all, was not finding fault with what Hindus may have
done (though finding fault with Hindus is certainly also on the secularists’
agenda), but to explain through Hindu behaviour the known Islamic conduct of
iconoclasm. This relation between Islamic iconoclasm and Hindu example has
never ever been established. On the contrary, whenever Muslim iconoclasts feel
the need to motivate their destructive behaviour, they cite Islamic examples,
first of all the destruction of the idols in the Ka’ba by Mohammed himself.

And let alone the words in chronicles or elsewhere,
it is actual deeds that prove the radical difference between Islamic iconoclasm
and any possible Hindu attitude. The NCERT itself quotes a case where a Vishnu
statue was abducted, and then installed for worship by the abductor himself. If
such were the example followed by Muslim iconoclasts, we would expect to find
mosques where Hindu statues from, say, the Somnath temple or the Rama
Janmabhumi temple had been installed. Unlike the Nehruvians, we are not provincials
and will not confine ourselves to India, so images of Apollo, Osiris, or any
other deity will also do. Pray, NCERT, where is that mosque where an abducted
idol has been installed for worship? We are not asking for two examples, just
one.

4 comments:

Interesting. Practice of abducting statues probably existed between Buddhists and Jains also, is it? When I was reading about Kharavela (Jain king from Kalinga), I read how he got back the Thirthankara statues which were abducted by Magadha kings (who were Buddhists).

You have a hawk's eye Dr Elst ji !!shows how deep the sickualrs have infiltrated the education field and pro hindhu groups are happily snoring. I guess the quota system is also being pushed thro to employ all sickular characters to do this criminal work.

About abduction of idols, there is a story in the biography of Sri Ramanujacharya, that he surreptitiously procured one of those abducted idols ("Cheluva Narayana" or handsome Narayana) from the daughter of Delhi sultan, brought it to Melukote in Mandya District of Karnataka, even as the Muslim princess who was in love with that idol came chasing. But, such episodes are no way comparable to wanton looting of idols, wealth of temples, destruction of temples, and using them as raw material for building mosques.

I think once the Islamic kings settled down to rule and administer after conquests and invasions, in a Hindu majority country, and that too a majority containing illustrious classes, especially needed for revenue and civil administration, they also tried to pacify them to an extent and did not pursue their iconoclastic expeditions. In those days, it was possible to be a tyrant but impossible to be a totalitarian, if I am not deemed contradictory. One had to make concessions and compromises and when one wants to settle down instead of just pillaging, plundering and going away, taking all the loot and slaves with them, I think that one has to calm down a bit and try to adjust with things and pose as an impartial ruler even if he is not and act to some extent to justify that posture. That is why you find Nizam of Hyderabad too, on the one hand, succumbing to Islamic extremism in the form of his covert, and some times overt support to the Razakars, etc. but at the same time keeping his realm (that is not in troubled regions) relatively free of communal clashes and also banning cow slaughter even to appease Hindu elites, on whose support he also thrived.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.